After a couple more weeks of multiple therapy sessions per week – some have been couples sessions, most singular — everything is coming into clear view about what’s been my problem all along.

The root of my pathology is this: I’ve never known how to manage my vulnerability. For the past 30 years I led each conversation with my “Hi, I am Matthew Shepard” introduction.

It’s always been an unfair burden to put on the people I am in relation with. To force them to choose between these black-and-white options: support me, or abandon me.

It’s why I blew up with you guys.
With Cameron.
With Tony.
With Dan’s wife, Julie.
With my older brother, Chris.
My parents.

Fuck, Guys, The list goes on and on for as many years I’ve been alive.

What happened with us has nothing to do with you and everything to do with me. It’s a vestige of my Harford County upbringing. The Catholicly dogmatic belief from my conservative upbringing that things are either good or evil; that people are either citizens in my family or foreigners — safety or danger.

Never an in-between.

I was the one unable to respect people’s boundaries. But most specifically Kevin’s boundaries.

From now on, I’m only allowed to be vulnerable to a list of people and in manners that we both mutually agree upon.

All of our friendship can’t be premised solely on my vulnerability anymore. I can’t keep rehashing the story of “what happened to me.”

It was only very recently that I was a child to Baltimore, but now I’m an adult in DC. Kevin and I were children in our group’s collective story, but now we’re living his and my next chapter.

For us all to become a cohesive group again, we all have to find a new center. My friendships need to be full of levity and conversations about map-making, work and aesthetic taste — television, books, art, whatnot.